Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) Mount Ktaadn, 1853 Oil on canvas Yale University Art Gallery, Stanley B Resor, BA, 1901, Fund. More about this work...

Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880) Hunter Mountain, Twilight, 1866 Oil on canvas Terra Foundation for the Arts, Daniel J Terra Collection More about this work...

Church eagerly read the works of the English critic John Ruskin, who taught young artists that to observe nature closely was to 'follow the finger of God'. The scientific precision of Church's works can be compared with Pre-Raphaelite landscapes of the same period. Like many of his contemporaries, Church firmly believed in economic progress as part of the divinely-ordained destiny of the United States. Admiring the heroic efforts of pioneers in clearing the forests and creating new farmland, artists such as Church and Sanford Robinson Gifford nonetheless lamented the resulting destruction of the wilderness. The stumps of felled trees symbolised this cruel transformation.

Only in remote northern states such as Maine could they still find what one contemporary called 'the fresh and natural surface of the planet earth'. Twilight in the Wilderness, shown in this room, is Church's great icon of America, celebrating a northern landscape innocent and untouched. Yet by 1860, when the painting was exhibited to great acclaim, the United States was only a year away from the Civil War. The political and economic tensions between the industrialised states of the North and the slave-owning South had become unsustainable. In retrospect it is possible to see Church's flaming vision as an apocalyptic portent of the violence which would soon engulf America.